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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Getty As Facebook faced a string of crises, it sought to tie its critics to George Soros, the billionaire at the center of many fringe right-wing conspiracy theories.

This summer, with anti-Facebook sentiment growing in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other fiascos, the social-media company had a public relations firm it had hired to attempt to pin the blame on Soros for the growing Freedom from Facebook movement, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. At Facebook's behest, Definers Public Affairs distributed to reporters a research report that accused Soros of quietly backing anti-Facebook groups and urged them to dig into the alleged financial connections between those groups and the businessman, The Times reported.